BACKGROUND Climate and sunlight (ultraviolet radiation) influence activity of atopic eczema. OBJECTIVE To evaluate the effect of moving from a subarctic/temperate climate to a sunny subtropical climate on children's atopic eczema. METHODS Children, 4-13 years, with severe atopic eczema were randomized to stay 4 weeks in Gran Canary (index patients = 30) and home in Norway (controls = 26), w...

This paper provides an overview of climatic changes that have been observed during the past century at certain high-elevation sites, and changes in a more distant past documented by a variety of climate-sensitive environmental indicators, such as tree-rings and alpine glaciers, that serve as a measure of the natural variability of climate in mountains over longer time scales. Detailed studies s...

C. Ringler et al. (eds), Global Change: Impacts on Water and Food Security, DOI: 10.1007/978-3-642-04615-5_3, © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2010 Abstract Water availability, access, and use has ensured food and livelihood security for millions. In the future, food and livelihood security may be challenged due to global environmental changes, particularly global climatic changes, that evid...

The end products of atmospheric degradation are not only CO2 and H2O but also sulfate and nitrate depending on the chemical composition of the substances which are subject to degradation processes. Atmospheric degradation has thus a direct influence on the radiative balance of the earth not only due to formation of greenhouse gases but also of aerosols. Aerosols of a diameter of 0.1 to 2 microm...

Detection and identification of the impacts of climate change on ecosystems have been core issues in climate change research in recent years. In this study, we compared average annual values of the normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) with theoretical net primary productivity (NPP) values based on temperature and precipitation to determine the effect of historic climate change on globa...

Lacustrine fossil records provide long time series of data on limnological and climatic conditions; these data are useful for establishing natural patterns of climate variability and for generating testable hypotheses about atmospheric circulation and climate-ecosystem linkages. Shoreline features can indicate past lake-level fluctuations that may reflect changes in moisture balance, but often ...

It can be argued that estimation of periodic signals in climate data requires either spectral methods or very long time series, or both. For obtaining a very precise estimate of signal properties this may be true, but for estimating periodicity to within plus or minus a few years, this is not true. To illustrate, we replicate the procedure used in the main manuscript. We take the model from Fig...

Given distinct climatic periods in the various facets of the Earth’s climate system, many attempts have been made to determine the exact timing of ‘change points’ or regime boundaries. However, identification of change points is not always a simple task. A time series containing N data points has approximately N distinct placements of k change points, rendering brute force enumeration futile as...

This paper provides a comprehensive overview of the state of the science in estimating potential effects of climate change on the human environment. The paper provides an overview of the state of effects research and outlines the analyses required in order to make adaptive policy. It compares approaches that have been taken for measuring the human consequences of climate change, and outlines th...